Dr Jay Dubashi
WITH the new year, the countdown has begun. The elections to the Lok Sabha are now only eighteen months away, which is not as long a time as you think. In fact, the elections in Gujarat were a kind of a curtain-raiser to the main show, and it is now only a matter of time before the main show starts.
After Gujarat, the Congress has realized its days are over, which is why there is such a deafening silence in Delhi and elsewhere. It took the Dynasty a whole week to grasp that the killing of an innocent girl in Delhi, only a few miles from 10 Janpath, was not a small event. For a whole week the leaders behaved in a typical bureaucratic fashion, firstly, that the matter was something for the state government to sort out, and had nothing to do with them. Our friend, Dr Manmohan Singh, a bureaucrat to his tips, never realized that a killing is a killing, whether it happens near your compound, not just Assam, from where you have gone to the Rajya Sabha, or Punjab, where you were born. Hence the flurry of desperate statements a whole week after the event, while the poor girl was fighting for life, by which time it was too late and the young men and women had taken charge of the situation and were baying for blood.
The spate of killings has not stopped with the hurried attempt to rush the poor girl, barely alive, to Singapore and even after her secret funeral in Delhi. But this has not stopped the rapes. On New Year day itself, there were at least ten rapes in the country as reported in a single newspaper, which means there were a hundred rapes in the country on a single day. In fact, even the United Nations, otherwise a lazy body of lazy people, had to take notice and has described India as a country of rapes, something the government run by a woman, should be ashamed of.
Let me now turn to the general elections. The pundits on TV, a singularly ignorant lot, are busy calculating odds sitting in their air conditioned studios, and will soon make a laughing stock of themselves.
They were wrong about Gujarat and they will be wrong about the next poll. They are always the last people to realise that the country has changed, that a new generation has taken over or is about to take over and nobody knows in which direction the country will move. The past is not therefore a guide to the future, and all prognostications based on the past are likely to go completely haywire.
As I said, the countdown has begun and the Congress is on its way out, if you go by current indications. The people are in no mood to entrust it with power the next time since they do not trust it anymore. In politics, as in other spheres, trust is an important factor, and when you lose it, your marriage is over. All these years, people trusted the party with power, and much else, but very little of this power has yielded benefits to the common man. Most of the benefits have gone to the very people whom the voters have elected, which means politicians, and their sidekicks like bureaucrats and businessmen. There are no signs that this is about to change. In fact, this triad has become so firm that nothing but a wholesale revolution can undo it, as in other countries from time to time.
This is exactly what is going to happen, for this is what always happens in history, when countries face a blank wall against which no change is possible. This is what happened, and is happening, in the Arab World, which had been in a tight grip of dictators and moulvis for the last few decades, with the result that no worthwhile progress was possible. On the face of it, things are pretty bad in Indial, but that is upto the common man to decide. And if you go by the way things are moving, it is clear that the common man, which means the voter, is in no mood to give the rascals another chance, which explains the revolt of the youth in Delhi and elsewhere and their spontaneous demonstrations in the very heart of the capital. We are in for a big change, and those who cannot or will not read the writing or the wall, are in for a big shock of their lives and this includes the Dynasty and its puppet in Race Course Road.
This is what happened in 1977 when Indira Gandhi was overthrown following the Emergency, and it will happen again in 2014. But, for that to happen, the voters have to realise, or have to be made to realise, that what they are up against is not an ordinary crisis but something much more serious that calls for a major surgical operation. The voters in Gujarat have realized this, which is why they refused to hand over power to the Dynasty once again. Gujarat is going to repeat itself all over India in 2014.
But change does not fall from the heavens; you have to work for it. You must create the right atmosphere for it and arouse the voters, as some of us did before the 1977 elections. You have to convince the voters that you cannot even begin to tackle their difficulties by a few changes in the budget or in foreign investment rules or by permitting Walmart to operate in India, but only thorugh fundamental changes in the way the government is run and who runs it. Will the Dynasty continue to run it? Then there is no chance of any fundamental transformation. The Dynasty will bring in a new face to hoodwink the voters, but this will not do, for the simple reason that, as long as the powers behind the new face continue to pull the strings, the new face will be no better than a cosmetic exercise and therefore worse than useless.
Unless therefore there is a thorough clean-up, no amount of the so-called “reforms” will do. There have been “reforms” from time to time but they have had little impact on the bulk of the population, particularly those at the bottom of the pile. What the country needs is not just economic “reforms” and Walmarts, but political and social reforms, the kind the United States had from time to time and which have kept that country ticking.
Ignore the pundits on the TV and their calculations about votes, because, as I said, they are an ignorant lot and are also part of the community that has gained from the “reforms”. Forget coalitions, and the so-called coalition dharma, for the country cries for a strong and decisive government at the centre, not a patchwork of corrupt parties who are in the game for what they can get out of it. And only the BJP can provide such a government.
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